Here is my current work in progress: a set of Prague Archways that I found on my recent trip. This is my first time lighting an outdoor environment and I have thoroughly enjoyed experimenting with the lighting parameters in UE4. The textures are 1 brick and 1 cement, both made by me in Substance Designer and edited with Substance Painter and inside UE4.
Here is the reference photo that I took. For the lighting I have used this as a reference for where the light is coming from and the level of dispersion, however I have used my own creative license to make it more aesthetically interesting and intriguing as a game level. I am still continuously tweaking the lighting.
My next step is to add some more detail to the floor, specifically the different bricks near the middle door and the drain details.
I would love to design a UI as if it were a game's welcome menu screen, and have it slowly transition between the day and night lighting setups.
UPDATE 2
I've done a lot of work primarily on the floor and the lighting. I tweaked the floor texture to better represent the reference, and added height variations to give the floor some natural bumps and irregularities. Overall I think this is a more realistic iteration than my initial version, but I feel that I still need to work on having the walls and floors join more seamlessly together.
For the lighting I put in a lot more thought with how I use the atmospheric and exponentional height fog within UE4. The goal I had with this was to lessen the overall cloudiness while keeping up an interesting aesthetic, and to give it the orange distance fog that my reference has. Doing this and tweaking some directional lights allowed more specular and normal details within the textures to become visible.
To create variation, adding in small pieces of foliage was suggested. While this breaks away from my reference, I agreed that visually it would be an improvement. I also had the idea of modelling a door to break up the modular scene, and so found a reference that perfectly paired these two aspects together. I felt that including some more broken rock shapes would create some much needed variation to the neat walls and pillars, and creating ivy would allow me to finally explore making foliage. My process with the foliage so far has been Maya > Photoshop > Designer > Maya, using Photoshop to make up for my current lack of access to ZBrush ( :'( ), and I look forward to experimenting with the subsurface effects in UE4.